Monday, December 13, 2010

Sure, the white stuff falling from the sky is pretty and all, viewed from the comfort of a porthole on the mess deck of a heavy frigate in orbit, and just so long as you got a mug of hot cocoa warming your paws. And there are commenters and sideliners who say 'Bring on the Christmas cheer,' as they sing joyfully, 'Let it snow; let it snow; let it snow!' and make snow angels.

The only pain of combat they've experienced is a slush ball to the side of the face during their snowball fight.

But let me tell you something, meat, as a soldier, me to you. Sure it's nice and all to be dropped in from orbit to take out a Covie installation or to retake an UNSC one (or, although nobody will ever admit it: to demolish an ONI one), but then does the enemy walk right up to your drop pod to get enough assault rounds to make sure they are hamburger?

No, you have to slog through that ... hm, I have to watch my marine mouth around you greenhorns ... that stuff armored up, with an assault rifle on your back, a holstered pistol, and enough rounds for each to make you think you weight as much as a Spartan II (which one metric ton, newbie: I've been to the armory when one of those Spartans was suiting up in their Mark V armor). And do you just have that, soldier? Of course not! Everybody has chatter, of course, but the HUD on your helmet, the meds, the food supplies and what are you going to drink? The atmosphere? Do you know how much water weighs?

Put all of that on various parts of your body, and do you think you are going to skip trippingly across the snow crust, light and airy, like a twinkletoed snow faery?

Hell no, kid! Every step is a fight with the environment, and then, after your first twenty steps from your pod, the cold starts to seep through your steel-reinforced combat boots ... that is your highly heat- (that is: cold-) conductive boots, and if you don't keeps marching double-quick time, your toes start to fall off from the frostbite. And if you do keep marching for more than an hour or two, frostbite sets in anyway.

You think combat with the covies is 'thirty seconds of fun'?

Well, it is if you meet an Elite, and the thirty seconds of fun is all them, when they draw their energy swords.

So, newbie, I know you're love with the romantic ideals of glorious combat, but you have to remember your history. This first, easy, mission is that we're taking back the Alpha Base on Harvest. Do you think the Covies are just going to hand over the proverbial keys to the base and say a friendly 'Worq, worq, worq, here ya go?' And after we wrest the base out of their cold, dead split-jaws, you think that you flip a switch and turn on the heat? From which smashed reactors would that be?

'Let it snow'? A more accurate quote is this one: 'War is nine months of cold, followed by winter.'

Helljumper, I got bad news for you: we are jumping into war in the middle of an Harvest winter.

... oh, and even after five-hundred years, Styx still can show us how music is made.

What? Why are you looking at me with that funny face? Sure I'm a marine, meaning I'm tough as nails. Hell, tougher: I eat nails for breakfast, for the iron content. When they say, 'bite the bullet, geophf,' I take them literally.

That's right, the soldiers. We've written poetry, from both sides of the philosopher's (thinking) stone, and we've been written about since writing existed. What did Homer write about? Soldiers. Battles. Real stuff.

So, call me Aeschylus. That fits: a man footnoted in history as a writer but moreso as a participant in the war that threatened all civilization.

I am a soldier in the great Human-Covenant war, and I'm also a writer.

And what does a soldier do? He fights.

And what does a writer do? He writes.

Here's not a story about me, but a story, and it turns out to be, like me, a footnoted one, but an important one, lost to history.